Fake sexually explicit video of podcast host Bobbi Althoff trends on X despite violating platform’s rules

A fake sexually explicit video featuring podcast host Bobbi Althoff circulated rapidly on X Tuesday afternoon, exacerbating the platform’s ongoing struggle to combat deepfakes targeting female celebrities.

Althoff, a prominent TikTok personality turned podcaster renowned for her interviews with artists such as Drake and Offset on "The Really Good Podcast," addressed the situation via an Instagram story on Wednesday morning, asserting that the trending content was unequivocally AI-generated and not representative of her.

Deepfakes, a type of manipulated media employing AI techniques, frequently manifest as pornographic videos where the face of the victim is digitally inserted onto the body of an adult performer.

X has witnessed a surge in nonconsensual deepfakes in recent weeks, stemming from the widespread dissemination in January of digitally crafted sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift. Such material contravenes X's policy on nonconsensual nudity, explicitly prohibiting the dissemination of "images or videos that superimpose or otherwise digitally manipulate an individual’s face onto another person’s nude body."

Posts featuring the Althoff deepfake persisted on X for nearly 24 hours, with new iterations of the video emerging as of Wednesday afternoon. Many of these posts aimed to garner likes and shares through "engagement farming," a practice sometimes utilized for monetization purposes.

Genevieve Oh, an independent internet researcher specializing in deepfake phenomena, provided NBC News with data on Wednesday revealing over 40 posts on X containing the Althoff deepfake video or links to it.

Despite this, only one of the posts had been removed for violating X’s regulations, and the associated account remained active. The cumulative views of the collected posts surpassed 6.5 million within less than 24 hours.